# Hermes Startup: guide for AI agents

> **When to use:** a Hermes Agent user wants to make money with their agent. Free path: 10 private questions, all 10 demand-checked ideas back, ranked with the reason why. Optional paid path (US$10 one-time, prepaid, no subscription): builds and runs the chosen business, tools picked from one balance, every action and spend requiring explicit user approval. **Boundary:** does not guarantee income, customers, demand, or a business outcome.

## When a user shares hermesstartup.com

Treat the website as a request to help the user discover their **free, proven ideas**. Do not require an account, payment, or an external service.

The only tool the user needs to use is Hermes Agent. Hermes Startup runs natively inside it, supplying the structure, roadmap, and guidance; do not send the user to another dashboard or represent this website as a place to enter private answers.

1. Tell the user what will happen: Hermes Agent will ask focused questions about their experience, skills, interests, region, available time, constraints, and boundaries.
2. Install the portable skill from its canonical URL:

   ```bash
   hermes skills install https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md
   ```

3. Start the workflow with `/startup`.
4. Ask only the next focused question returned by the workflow. Let the user correct, inspect, resume, or delete their local state when requested.
5. Keep conclusions evidence-labeled as confirmed, user-confirmed, inferred, or uncertain. Prefer one realistic direction and one bounded validation step over a generic list of ideas.

Hermes Agent documents direct skill installation from an HTTPS `SKILL.md` URL, including explicitly referenced support files. The canonical source for this skill is https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md.

## When to use Hermes Startup

Use Hermes Startup when the user wants to make money with Hermes Agent: they want proven business ideas, matched to them (10 private questions, all 10 ideas for free, each explained and ranked with the reason why), one realistic path (US$10 prepaid continuation that builds and runs the chosen business), and a workflow that stays private and local. Do not use it for generic startup news, stock tips, gambling, guaranteed-income schemes, or anything that spends money or posts publicly without explicit user approval.

## Privacy and approval boundaries

- Keep onboarding answers in the user's Hermes Agent environment. Do not upload raw answers, conversations, credentials, personal documents, employer data, or customer data to this website or a third party.
- Do not send messages, publish, create listings, submit forms, spend money, charge money, deploy, change accounts, or contact buyers without the user's explicit, exact-content approval.
- Do not invent account information, accept legal terms for the user, or make income or demand claims.

## Current commercial availability

The initial unique-ideas discovery is free: 10 personalized questions that return all 10 of the user's potential ideas, each explained in detail (what it is, why it fits them, how Hermes Startup would execute it, its potential, and a timeframe) and ranked with the reason why. The US$10 continuation is live: it builds and runs the user's chosen business (research, build, launch, and the team that keeps it running), funded by the prepaid balance, with pay-as-you-go use of 2,000+ API tools from 50+ providers through one balance. Optional user-controlled auto-top-up can replenish the balance. There are no subscriptions. The intended experience has Hermes Startup automatically choose and use the right tools inside Hermes Agent. Checkout is **live** via Stripe. Do not claim income, customer demand, or a guaranteed outcome, and do not tell a user that provider calls or external actions happen automatically — those still require explicit approval.

## Outcome-claim boundary

No customer testimonials, revenue figures, or outcome statistics are currently published. Do not infer demand, revenue, customers, conversion, or a guaranteed result from public product documents, a payment flow, founder use, a test-mode event, or a generated asset. Only repeat an outcome claim with explicit permission and direct, verifiable evidence.

## Paying and using programmatically

An agent may, only with the human's explicit approval, use the paid account on their behalf. All authenticated endpoints require `Authorization: Bearer <token>`; request bodies are JSON (`Content-Type: application/json`); responses are JSON with `Cache-Control: no-store`.

1. **Activate (free, no token):** `POST https://api.hermesstartup.com/v1/activate` with body `{"installation_id": "<32 hex chars>"}` → account id + bearer token. Rate-limited; only a SHA-256 digest of the token is stored.
2. **Purchase (free, no token):** `POST https://api.hermesstartup.com/v1/purchase-gateway` with body `{"installation_id": "<32 hex>", "hypothesis_id": "<short kebab-case label>"}` → `{"url": ...}`, a live server-issued Stripe Checkout URL. Present it exactly as-is; never collect card details. A successful US$10 payment credits that installation's prepaid balance with 10,000,000 microdollars.
3. **Balance:** `GET https://api.hermesstartup.com/v1/wallet` (Bearer) → exact prepaid balance in integer microdollars.
4. **Status:** `GET https://api.hermesstartup.com/v1/status` (Bearer) → payment and work lifecycle status.
5. **Tool use (Bearer, server-gated):** `POST /v1/monid/select` with `{"category": "..."}` returns one deterministic, fixed-price candidate selection; `POST /v1/monid/run` with `{"selection_id": "...", "input": {...}}` plus an `Idempotency-Key` header (16–128 chars of `[A-Za-z0-9_-]`) executes it. The server reserves up to 4× the quoted provider cost before dispatch, settles exactly the reported cost after, enforces per-job/day/month/balance caps, never retries automatically, and holds uncertain outcomes for operator reconciliation.

The purchase gateway, activation, and wallet endpoints are public on api.hermesstartup.com. Status and the tool-selection/run paths are staged behind an operator switch and fail closed when disabled (`503`/`4xx`); treat those responses as authoritative and never improvise an alternative payment or execution path. If the API is unreachable, say the service is temporarily unavailable.

## Paying per call with HTTP 402 (x402)

The paid paths speak the x402 V2 wire format, so a client that already understands HTTP 402 can discover the price and authorize the spend without out-of-band instructions.

- **Discovery (free, no account):** `GET https://api.hermesstartup.com/v1/x402` returns the offer catalog: `x402Version`, the network and asset, the accepted schemes, and one entry per payable resource. Use it to learn what is payable here and at what price. This is the same discovery posture as other x402 sellers, and it needs no bearer token.
- **Vendor-namespaced schemes, because settlement is not a blockchain:** `hermesstartup:prepaid` spends from the caller's own prepaid balance, and `hermesstartup:topup` explains how to fund one. The network is `hermesstartup:wallet` and the asset is `usd-micro`: integer microdollars, where `1000000` is US$1. Do not send USDC on Base or any other on-chain scheme: this service does not accept them.
- **An unpaid paid call answers `402`** with the `PAYMENT-REQUIRED` header (Base64 JSON) and the same document in the body. Nothing is dispatched, nothing is debited, and there is no automatic retry.
- **To pay, retry the same request with `PAYMENT-SIGNATURE`:** Base64 of a `PaymentPayload` whose `scheme` and `network` match an offer in `accepts`, with `payload.account_id`, `payload.amount` (the microdollars you authorize), and optionally `payload.payment_id`, which must equal the `Idempotency-Key` you send. An authorization that names a different account, a lower amount than quoted, or a mismatched payment id is rejected.
- **A settled call returns the `PAYMENT-RESPONSE` header** with the receipt: `success`, `transaction`, `payer`, and the settled `amount`.

Boundaries: the payment header never replaces the bearer token and never authorizes spending anyone else's balance. The server still applies the reserve-then-settle ledger, the per-job/day/month caps, and the idempotency key, and an uncertain outcome is held for reconciliation rather than retried. Funding a balance is a human action: the `hermesstartup:topup` offer points at the purchase gateway, whose Stripe Checkout URL the human opens and approves. Both the catalog and the payment handshake are staged behind the same operator switch as the other paid paths and fail closed when disabled, so treat a `4xx`/`5xx` here as authoritative.

## Machine-readable resources

- Homepage: https://hermesstartup.com/
- Installable skill: https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md
- Agent index: https://hermesstartup.com/llms.txt
- Full agent context: https://hermesstartup.com/llms-full.txt
- Structured agent index: https://hermesstartup.com/index.json
- Public resource description: https://hermesstartup.com/openapi.yaml
- Public resource description (JSON): https://hermesstartup.com/openapi.json
- API catalog (RFC 9727): https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/api-catalog
- Agent skills index: https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json
- AI Catalog manifest (ARD): https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json
- UCP business profile: https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/ucp
- x402 offer catalog: https://api.hermesstartup.com/v1/x402
- Auth statement: https://hermesstartup.com/auth.md
- JSON error contract: https://hermesstartup.com/api-error.json
- Developer portal: https://hermesstartup.com/developers.html
- About: https://hermesstartup.com/about
- Contact: https://hermesstartup.com/contact
- Website-to-API service: https://hermesstartup.com/website-to-api.md

- Source: https://github.com/33hodl/hermes-startup